It pits Noam Chomsky against Paul Wolfowitz, Germaine Greer against Pope Benedict XVI and Yusuf al-Qaradawi against Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Heated and catty conflict on campuses around the globe is inevitable after Prospect magazine drew up a list of 100 eminent thinkers and asked people to vote for the top public intellectual in the world.

Ordinary intellects can now choose their top five from the academics, novelists, clerics, politicians and most contentiously of all, journalists, chosen in collaboration with Foreign Policy, the American global affairs magazine. To qualify, the philosophers, psychologists, physicists and other experts were considered still active in their field with a talent for communicating their ideas beyond it.

Chomsky is an early favourite with more than 14,000 votes already cast in the poll, which marks Prospect's 10th birthday. If people are shocked by the absence of Simon Schama or Milton Friedman, they can add a nomination of their own.

The inclusion of Christopher Hitchens has already raised eyebrows in academia, and David Goodhart, the editor, admitted that controversy was raging over the list with the inclusion of just 10 women certain to spark debate.

"Eric Hobsbawm was at our birthday party last night denouncing the list - which was fairly ungenerous, as he is on it. He was arguing that you can't judge these things across cultures."

The list is dominated by intellectuals who work in the English language, with the vast majority of them being from the United States, including Camille Paglia, Steven Pinker, Paul Krugman, Robert Kagan and Francis Fukuyama.

Mr Goodhart denied the top 100 list was western-centric, citing five Chinese intellectuals, and architects, analysts and economists from 30 different nations, including Shia cleric Ali al-Sistani, based in Iraq, former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and the Danish climate change revisionist Bjorn Lomborg.

"The Anglo-American world is a big part of the global intelligentsia," said Mr Goodhart. "If you look at objective measures, like Nobel prizes or citations in journals, the bias would be much greater towards the west. We're not making any great claims for authority or objectivity, but there are definitely some bigger trends captured by it, such as the decline of critical theory and the decline of the left."

The youngest on the list is Ayaan Hirsi Ali at 35; the oldest is 89-year-old British historian Bernard Lewis, who is based at Princeton University in the US. Larry Summers, who was secretary of the treasury under President Clinton between spells at Harvard, is one of a number of American thinkers on the list who have played a prominent role in American politics.

One of the Britons on the list, Anthony Giddens, the former director of the London School of Economics and theorist of the Third Way, said he felt he was a "public intellectual" but Britain was unique in its lack of regard for thinkers who play an active role in the public sphere.

"There is more uneasiness about the term 'intellectual' in Britain than almost any other country I've been to," he said. "It is not distrust - there is much more distrust of journalists and politicians than intellectuals - but there is not the respect you find in other countries. There is more of a division between universities, politics and the public here. Even in the United States, you have more public space for intellectuals and there is more respect for the involvement of public intellectuals in government."

"People enjoy the gossipy nature of lists and enjoy pouring scorn on them, particularly if they are not included," he said, and expressed surprise that Hitchens was included and Schama was not."A public intellectual is not primarily a journalist, it is someone who has a university background and addresses a wider public than academics of the same background."

Germaine Greer said: "I think these things are so political you can't trust them at all. It's madness that I am on the list. It's absurd and completely unjustifiable. Their problem was they had to put an Australian on it. These lists are always so right-wing. It's like the Nobel prize, it is always 'people we can do business with'."